BA (Hons) Fine Art; Cardiff School of Art & Design

Ben Lewis Giles

I’ve come across Ben Giles collage work, and primarily really loved his the beauty of his work and his way of enhancing the world by creating euphoric interactions between human and nature through narrative. All the pieces I have seen on his website are all done with traditional scissors and glue, but they have such a completion and maturity that I’d have thought they would be digitally enhanced in some way. I also love that his collage material comes from National Geographic’s, Anatomy books, encyclopaedias etc. of which he finds in charity shops and car boot sales which is where my own collage material mainly comes from also. He says that the broad use of colour was originally an aesthetic choice, but has become a personal and visual celebration.

I love his anatomy pieces with representations of nature such as flowers and birds because to me, they speak for a relationship between human nature and the nature of the planet which is really relevant for my subject module research, and also my dissertation research.

Additionally, I really like the pieces where Giles has tampered with scale to create the illusion of the figures being much larger than normal: giant-like. I could appropriate this idea as the human ignorance and apathy I considered early on in the subject module this academic year, with humans maybe believing they’re more important than their surroundings.